The Role of the Inside Sales Agent

On the first episode of Real Estate ISA Radio, your hosts, Nate Joens of Structurely and Robby Trefethren of Hatch Coaching, are joined by the one and only, Erik Hatch - Founder and CEO of Hatch Coaching and The Erik Hatch Team.

isaradio-podcast1-9-3-18.mp3

[00:00:00] Hello everyone. This is Nate with Structurely welcoming you to our first ever Real Estate ISA Radio podcasts where we give you an inside look into the science and setup of building a successful inside sales team for your real estate business. I'm here today with some special guest. Robbie T and Erik Hatch. Robby, I'll let you introduce Erik!

[00:00:38] Awesome. Yeah. So I got Erik here. Erik is literally right down my right hand man said it to my right said seated my right. But you know Erik is not just a co-worker he's one of my best friends and he's our partner in crime in believing in this ISA world. And honestly being the person that first dreamt somebody doing it at his highest level. I want introduce Erik a little bit. We're based here in Fargo. And Erik has built now a team that will do seven hundred-ish deals give or take some 700 or 750 depending on how things shape up. And he's got his hands and fingerprints all over Fargo here as well as real estate interests like our Hatch coaching and. Erik, you want to introduce yourself a little bit and tell people who you are.

[00:01:35] Well Nathan and Robby it's an honor to be here especially in the first episode of Real Estate ISA Radio this is this is great stuff. You guys are up to something that that's cracked the code for the ISA piece you're able to elevate your game your business your service and all the fun from maybe 60 or 70 percent functionality right up to the top 100 percent.

[00:02:00] And so it's been an honor to be on the ride with Robby and a fellow ISAs in Fargo as well and we weapons. So thanks for having

[00:02:08] Us Yeah. We're really excited for you to have to be on our very first episode today. So with that I do want to just give a quick background is this is our first episode on myself. My name is Nate I'm the CEO. Structurely we're an artificial intelligence based inside sales company for real estate out of Ames and my co host Robbie t who has a great deejay nickname at Deejay Robbie T. I'm sure that's going to stick. We're looking out right now by the way. I love it. Yeah and we're where we're the cohosts of real estate ISA radio moving forward. So without further ado we really want to jump into our first topic which is just simply the role of the inside sales agent. We're going to touch on describing the framework of a new lead journey from when they register on a Web site or portal to when they get to your ISA. And then when they're passed off to an agent we're then going to touch compensation structure of the ISA you know what makes them tick what a typical day in the life of an ISA is like. And I think that you two especially are going to be great with this topic so that further do Erik come to pass this question off to you. What exactly does an inside sales agent do in real estate.

[00:03:25] Hopefully everything.

[00:03:28] I mean I would say this is that you don't have an ISA you are the ISA. So whether you are somebody who is brand new to the business or you have a team of 90 people whomever is the lead converter is the ISA. ISA stands for inside sales agent but really I think it's inside service and inside sales that acronym is ISIS and we probably don't want to be calling these crewmembers ISIS. And so instead we're just trying to call them ISAs. The truth of the matter is when a leader signs out when they have raised their hand whether it be signing up through a Web site or party vendors Zillow or realtor.com that they call them to our office. We've structured our team so that our ISAs are the first touch for and have not met anybody who we don't have a relationship already established with. And so it's their job to nurture maintain massage listen to pursue. And basically they are the keepers of those relationships. Converting have not met into mats.

[00:04:35] Their job their goal is to of course protect them strategically design their action to protect the company's dollar so that it can go for may have not met from somebody who has signed up to a match which is it kept appointments and so that's the ISAF main role and function awesome.

[00:04:54] Yeah I think that's a great great introduction to start. So when when did it make sense for your team attached realty to actually add an inside sales agent.

[00:05:04] So that's realty functions only as a team. The air catching up had fidelity and an outside hatch Cochon because Embury an original when it comes to anything when they hatch by the time this is done.

[00:05:21] And my new company happily set a structure there that gives me a firebrand. That's right.

[00:05:30] I go back to 2013. I started my team in 2012 and I can't tell you how much money I wasted on trying to figure out how to convert leads.

[00:05:42] In 2012 I hired a whole bunch of agents and I trained them poorly and they were always out doing showings and distracted. And traditionally if we got back to any Internet lead within 24 hours we'd like give ourselves a pat on the back thinking that we were crushing it. And then in 2013 I was studying what other models were doing and I saw other people doing the I'd say and so I said well they look smarter and more talented than these. I'm just going to copy printer this and call of our own. And so I hired my friend Josh who was drawn to real estate had a career in higher education and an amazing thing happened.

[00:06:17] Josh wasn't a great ISA in terms of structure or the things he said or the way he acted but he did this crazy thing called answering the phone and responding to leads in a timely fashion. And we watched the amount of business that came from have not grow substantially and we recognized right away that we were on to something because we realized that speed to lead was this crucial form age. It didn't even matter if he was good at what he was doing. If he responded quickly and promptly we had so much more business than we ever had. And so in most real estate people are structured where they are the ones receiving the calls but the moment they're with a client or a family member or if they are in another appointment or if they're distracted on another call maybe they're not able to respond to speed to leave and that that's not a high function for them because of that that's there's this massive gap in people's businesses and those that have ISAs are watching their businesses surge because people want immediacy.

[00:07:18] And we've figured that out back in 2013 and now it's more prevalent than ever.

[00:07:24] That's great. And you know you can you kind of touched on your first ISA you know didn't have phone skills maybe necessarily but you know could you talk me a little bit about what made that ISA special what makes your ISA special today. What are those skills that they typically have.

[00:07:43] Well Josh was the same way. We think that whenever we're hiring somebody we use a three three tiered system of the first 50 percent this culture. We need people to fix the organization that we're running. We call ourselves a team. I don't have employees. I don't have people that work for me. We have a team and a f...